Painting of the new tapir species. Painting courtesy of Fabrício R. Santos.

A tapir known to the local people and unknown to Western scientists has been found. This all sounds similar to an early story told in cryptozoology.

In 1812, Baron Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and zoologist, made what cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans called his “RashDictum“: Cuvier remarked that it was unlikely that any large animal remained undiscovered. But Cuvier was wrong. Tapirus indicus, the Malayan, white-backed, or Indian tapir is famous within cryptozoology as the first animal to be described as a “new species” after Cuvier’s infamous 1812 declaration.

Although it was ethnoknown to the Chinese and Japanese “since time immemorial,” Cuvier distrusted such traveler’s tales. Therefore, the white-backed tapir was not known in the West until it was collected and formally described to the Asiatic Society in 1819.

Until the fifth species was announced this week, four species of tapir were recognized: three found in Central and South America, Baird’s Tapir (Tapirus bairdii), Brazilian Tapir, also called Lowland Tapir, (Tapirus terrestris), and Mountain Tapir (Tapirus pinchaque), and one found in Asia, Malayan Tapir (Tapirus indicus). The Mountain Tapir are the rarest, and have longer, woolly fur.

Now a new species of tapir has been discovered: the Kobomani Tapir (Tapirus kabomani). The species name follows the local Paumarí moniker for this specific tapir, arabo kabomani.

This is the first new tapir discovered since Baird’s, in 1865 and the largest terrestrial mammal discovered since the saola in 1992! No wonder it is being called the “biggest zoological discovery” of the present century.

“In what will likely be considered one of the biggest (literally) zoological discoveries of the Twenty-First Century, scientists today announced they have discovered a new species of tapir in Brazil and Colombia. The new mammal, hidden from science but known to local indigenous tribes, is actually one of the biggest animals on the continent, although it’s still the smallest living tapir,” notes Mongabay writer Jeremy Hance.

“Found inhabiting open grasslands and forests in the southwest Amazon (the Brazilian states of Rondônia and Amazonas, as well as the Colombian department of Amazonas), the new species is regularly hunted by the Karitiana tribe who call it the ‘little black tapir.’ The new species is most similar to the Brazilian tapir (Tapirus terrestris), but sports darker hair and is significantly smaller: while a Brazilian tapir can weigh up to 320 kilograms (710 pounds), the Kabomani weighs-in around 110 kilograms (240 pounds). Given its relatively small size it likely won’t be long till conservationists christen it the pygmy or dwarf tapir. It also has shorter legs, a distinctly-shaped skull, and a less prominent crest. ”

The cryptozoologically ethnoknown nature of this former cryptid cannot be overstated.

“[Indigenous people] traditionally reported seeing what they called ‘a different kind of anta [tapir in Portuguese].’ However, the scientific community has never paid much attention to the fact, stating that it was always the same Tapirus terrestris,” said lead author Mario Cozzuol, the paleontologist who first started investigating the new species ten years ago. “They did not give value to local knowledge and thought the locals were wrong. Knowledge of the local community needs to be taken into account and that’s what we did in our study, which culminated in the discovery of a new species to science.”

“[Indigenous people] were essential,” co-author Fabrício R. Santos told mongabay.com, “particularly because they know about this ‘variety’ for decades, if not, centuries, and the hunters can precisely differentiate both species, because all of skulls they provide us matched our morphometric and DNA analyses.”

Others have claimed knowledge of this tapir before.

Zoologist Marc Van Roosmalen has been gathering evidence of a pygmy tapir for decades. Source.

But this discovery has now been scientifically confirmed. And the photographs are amazing.

This new species of tapir was actually hunted by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 with a specimen from his South American expedition still resting in the American Museum of Natural History in New York to this day. At the time of his hunt, Roosevelt wrote that the local hunters called the tapir a “distinct kind.”

This early record is to be found in Allen, J. A. 1914. Mammals collected on the Roosevelt Brazilian expedition, with field notes by Leo Miller. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35:559–610.